3,000 Georgia-Pacific paper towels (also $35 with Prime); more than 100,000 different cellphone cases under $10; 5,000 pens customized with your name and logo ($1,926.75); a jar of face mask made from sheep placenta and embryo ($49); a bunch of bananas ($2.19); a forty-pound bag of Diamond Naturals Adult Real Meat dog food ($36.99); voice-controlled Amazon hardware that will tell you the weather, and play you Tchaikovsky, and turn over evidence to the police if it needs to ($39.99 to $149.99); a stream of the 1942 movie Casablanca ($3.99 to rent); two seasons of the Amazon show The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (free if you’re a Prime member, which more than half of American households are); a wide variety of data storage and cloud computing services (prices vary, but the quality is unbeatable—Amazon is used by the CIA). My Amazon homepage is advertising two-hour grocery delivery. Fifty-six percent of online retail searches now begin at Amazon.
Amazon is an octopus: nimble, fluid, tentacled, brilliant, poisonous, appealing, flexible enough to squeeze enormous bulk through tiny loopholes. Amazon has chewed up brick-and-mortar retail: an estimated 8,600 stores closed in 2017, a significant increase from the 6,200 stores that closed in 2008, at the peak of the recession. The company has decimated office-supply stores, toy stores, electronics stores, and sporting goods stores, and now that it owns Whole Foods, grocery stores will likely be next. Amazon, which spent years taking huge venture-backed losses so that it could lower prices enough to kill off all the competition, is now arguably the first illegal monopsony. (In a monopsony, a single buyer purchases goods from the vast majority of sellers; in a monopoly, it’s the opposite.) And all of this began when Bezos was working at a hedge fund in the nineties and got the idea to sell books online.
Bezos chose books because they presented a unique market opportunity: whereas physical bookstores could stock and sell only a tiny fraction of all the books that were on the market, an online bookstore could keep a basically unlimited inventory. Books also gave Bezos a way to track the habits of “affluent, educated shoppers,” wrote George Packer in 2014, in a New Yorker piece detailing Amazon’s takeover of the book industry. With this data, Amazon could figure out what else it could sell the way it sold books—at artificially low prices, with razor-thin margins. As long as the company kept growing, “investors would pour in money and Wall Street wouldn’t pay much attention to profits.” Amazon didn’t get out of the red until 2001, seven years after Bezos started the company—at which point it was well on its way to effectively synthesizing human instinct with its consumer interface. Buying something on Amazon, Packer wrote, feels instinctive, reflexive, much like scratching an itch.
Efficiency at this scale requires extreme devaluation. To use Amazon—which I did regularly for years, with full knowledge of its labor practices—is to accept and embrace a world in which everything is worth as little as possible, even, and maybe particularly, people. Its corporate culture is notoriously hellish. In 2015, the Times published a story that described Amazon as “conducting a little-known experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers, redrawing the boundaries of what is acceptable.” A former employee told them, “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.” Treatment is far worse at the warehouse level, and until recently, the pay was inexcusable: Bezos is the richest man in the world, but his warehouse employees often made just enough to clear the federal poverty line. (Of course, this is part of the reason he’s the richest man in the world.) Amazon warehouse workers, unlike most other warehouse workers, are unprotected by unions and often classified as temps, which for years allowed the company to avoid providing benefits and to skirt workers’ compensation claims for people who were injured, often seriously, on the job. They enter through metal detectors and spend the day strapped to Amazon-patented monitoring equipment, speed-walking in circles around an enormous, airless, fluorescent-lit warehouse, expected to pack and complete new packages every thirty seconds. (The new Amazon trackers even vibrate to warn workers that they’re moving too slow.) As Mac McClelland detailed in her 2012 undercover investigation at Mother Jones, managers time their workers’ toilet breaks—there are many stories of workers peeing in water bottles to avoid punishment—and if they don’t consistently adhere to what McClelland described as a “goal-meeting suicide pace,” they’re fired.
Until the company became